Por Joshua Frank
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Amazon AWS data center, image Wikipedia. |
Most would agree that the animals suffering as the world burns need our help. So Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio’s $200 million commitment to the Phoenix Species Project to revive 100 endangered species around the world should be welcome news.
Leo believes it is.
“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio wrote joyously in an Instagram post. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”
I sincerely hope that’s true and that these creatures, including a lemur in Madagascar, a pink iguana in the Galápagos, a pancake tortoise in Tanzania, see tangible benefits from conservation efforts.
Yet I can’t help but sense a perversity in all of this.
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The initiative is being funded with Bezos’s blood money, as was his 2020 launch of the $10 billion greenwashed Earth Fund. All the cash Bezos is throwing at the environment is nowhere near enough to offset the damage caused by the creation of his obscene wealth, which places him in the top three richest people on the planet. Amazon, the company that made him all that money, is one of the world’s largest corporate climate polluters.
Even under the company’s own accounting (which critics contend is far from accurate), Amazon’s 2025 carbon emissions surpassed its 2024 record, reaching 80 million metric tons, a 16% increase. Its electric purchases, primarily for data centers, jumped by 34%, and emissions from Amazon’s fleet of delivery and transport vehicles increased by 20%, accounting for over 76% of its total carbon footprint.
This doesn’t even take into consideration the emissions from Bezos’s lavish lifestyle and excessive investment portfolio. He owns two private jets and a $500 million, 417-foot superyacht, which together emit about 10,000 tons of CO2.
According to a damning Oxfam report, Bezos is responsible, through his corporations, investments and consumption, for a million times more carbon pollution than the average person.
“The world’s poorest communities, those who have done the least to cause climate change – those who are least able to respond and recover – are the ones who are suffering the worst consequences. This is unfair and immoral,” Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland told The Guardian.
Bezos’s contribution to climate change is about to get a whole lot worse.
A proposed data center in Pecos County, Texas, is so large that its 35 gas-burning turbines, operating at 7.65 gigawatts, will make it the country’s single largest source of fossil fuel emissions. It will emit an insane 33 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution each year.
“That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria,” writes Joe Wilkins at Futurism.
This is just one more example (and I detail many more in the forthcoming Bad Energy) of why renewables can’t keep up with our ever-increasing demand for electricity, thanks in no small part to billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Big Tech’s appetite for data center destruction.
Amazon is relying on gas to run its fleet of servers because solar and wind would require an immense amount of land to build out.
A solar farm requires up to 7,000 acres to supply 1 GW of electricity. For Amazon’s future data center in Texas (if we don’t stop it), the company would need 49,000 acres of land covered with solar panels to generate 7 GW of electricity. That’s over 76 square miles, roughly the size of Madison, Wisconsin.
Sorry, Leo, I know you think you’re doing a good thing here by trying to save imperiled species from extinction, but your buddy Jeff Bezos can’t buy his way out of the destruction he’s manifested.
Oh, and while you’re closing the door on Bezos, could you divest from that disgusting eco-resort you’re helping finance in Israel, too?
Thanks.
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Want to show your contempt for all these data centers and the destruction they are causing?
You can bundle Bad Energy with this cool t-shirt, designed by CounterPuncher and artist Roger Peet, available at Pilsen Community Books (US shipping only).
The shirt and a signed book will ship September 8, while supplies last.
JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social
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